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Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

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Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#151

Post by wnevets »

crazygringo wrote: post #44

> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…

> I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for

This is one of the things I love about google as a user. Googling "what is my ip" or "how many inches in a meter" used to require you to visit some random website filled to the brim with ads.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#152

Post by ir77 »

if you want to specifically have google find you a wiki article why not just go to wiki directly, or bookmark it on your phone and create an app, or use any of the many apps that go to wiki directly.

i don't like google but this practice seems 100% legit, someone looking for a broad answer finds an answer immediately outside of wiki and they're happy with it.

i personally don't want -- ever -- wiki to be #1 on my search results, if i want a wiki answer i'll go there directly, i use search engines to find variety of answers.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#153

Post by bzb3 »

boogies wrote: post #110
boogies wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not underfunded at all. What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.

Addendum: their revenue was actually following an upward trend as of their last report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#K... But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects

Couldn't it be said Wikipedia is basically complete? Which would explain the declining number of edits

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#154

Post by KineticLensman »

dehrmann wrote: post #125
geeostation wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, it shouldn't be "legal" for one or cartel corporation to mediate between content/data and its users. its downright dystopian.

The "one" part is out fault for not using Bing, but isn't "mediating content" between users and websites essentially the premise of a search engine?

The complaint is not that content is being mediated, but that it is one company or cartel that is doing the mediating.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#155

Post by blululu »

dawnerd wrote: post #82
thesimon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they have more than enough money already?

They surely would if they weren’t needlessly adding terrible UX “features”

Not to justify wasting money, but the questionable UX features are a relatively small part of the massive cash fire that is the WMF. Also, while there have been some large and costly failures (Visual Editor), UX features are one of the few areas where I think that the WMF could realistically advance their purpose: increasing engagement with the encyclopedia. Features like Page Previews can be very helpful. There are a number of possible UX tweaks to improve reading and editing the encyclopedia, and these could all be helpful to the long term health of the encyclopedia (assuming they don't cut into the budget for servers).

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#156

Post by Noumenon72 »

doublesCs wrote: post #26
colmvp wrote: post #16

I've definitely noticed that I"ve had to add "wiki" to my search results to see Wikpedia articles to certain subjects I'm searching for whereas in previous years, Wikipedia was almost always the number one result. I feel like I'm back in the 90s when Yahoo went from a pretty good search engine to mediocre with ads and stuff, and I marveled at the clean simplicity of Google. Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of ar…

If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.

Once you get used to keyword searches, here are some other handy ones. It's like having a CLI to the Internet.

gm Google Maps

t thesaurus.com

u YouTube (for music)

pron for porn (after setting up a Google custom search engine that searches your favorite tube sites -- https://developers.google.com/custom-search)

gi for Google Images

r for Reddit (the site search has gotten better -- I used to use Google "site:reddit.com %s" instead).

My only problem with these is somehow the Wayback Machine doesn't work when I put https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#157

Post by boogies »

jeffbee wrote: post #136
boogies wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addendum: their revenue was actually following an upward trend as of their last report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#K... But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects

Serving pages to logged-in users is very costly to Wikimedia. Edits are even more costly.

What I'm trying to communicate is that Wikimedia has challenges, possibly exacerbated by Google's behaviour, but the challenges are not money. Wikimedia is not a for-profit corporation, it's a non-profit with a mission to collect and distribute knowledge. Google distributes pieces of that knowledge, but does not contribute to the collection of new knowledge.¹ Wikimedia has all the money it needs, and is getting more money from more people all the time. It does not have all the contributions it needs in the form of new knowledge, and by many measures the new knowledge it gets is decreasing.

tl;dr

The monetary cost does not really matter

1. It does contribute money, which Wikimedia does not need.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#158

Post by ebg13 »

wnevets wrote: post #151
crazygringo wrote: post #44

> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…

> I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for This is one of the things I love about google as a user. Googling "what is my ip" or "how many inches in a meter" used to require you to visit some random website filled to the brim with ads.

> filled to the brim with ads

You let yourself see ads on the web?

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#159

Post by nemo »

crazygringo wrote: post #84
the_duke wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't like the short Wikipedia excerpts. I almost always want more information, and Google tries to make the Wikipedia link as unintuitive as possible in order to keep the user on Google property. What's more, showing the info box means that the real article link is removed from the results list. Edit: to clarify, I do find the blue Wikipedia link decidedly small and I often have to actively look for it…

> Google tries to make the Wikipedia link as undiscoverable as possible Huh? If I search for "who founded the new york times", then immediately below the three-line snippet answer, is a big (not small) blue link to "The New York Times - Wikipedia". In fact, it's literally the easiest, most prominent thing on the page for me to click on. Google is helping to guide me on to visit Wikipedia for more info. I think you're…

I think they're talking about the Knowledgegraph, assuming Knowledgegraph is the content in the right column. If so, they're right. The discoverability of wikipedia in that thing is poor and it's aggravating when they bury the one link I want inside text content so it's a moving target on the page in a small font.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#160

Post by notatoad »

boogies wrote: post #110
boogies wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not underfunded at all. What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.

Addendum: their revenue was actually following an upward trend as of their last report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#K... But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects

the decreasing number of edits likely has more to do with the obnoxious edit policies and power users who will stamp down on any new users trying to edit, rather than a few less pageviews directed from google search results.
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